The Price of Blood pb-1 Read online

  Just like Ray used to do, Broker tapped the short, fat French cigarette on his thumbnail and put it to his lips. Nina clicked the lighter and stated, “Dammit, don’t you get it. General LaPorte’s been over there posing as an environmentalist taking pictures of the bottom of the South China Sea.”

  Broker inhaled the strong tobacco and tightened the bolts on his masking smile to ward off Nina’s raving attempt to raise the dead. More than that, he resented her confident quick-study routine. Her zeal. Her confidence. She was starting to have that effect on him. The urge to prove her wrong was almost a sneer behind his lips.

  “He found it, that’s what Tuna’s getting at,” she asserted. “I have a map with a coordinate. I have a sonar image of a wrecked U.S. Army Chinook helicopter, laying in one hundred feet of water off the coast of central Vietnam. I snuck it from LaPorte’s office last night in New Orleans. That’s why he’s after me. The genie is out of the bottle, Broker.”

  “The Hue gold,” said Broker in a hollow voice.

  “The Hue gold. Ten tons of it. Which my father did not steal.”

  11

  For all he knew, the Hue gold really was a myth. He had, after all, never actually seen it. No one had. But that one elongated syllable-gold-got stuck in his ears and reverberated in the drafty acoustics of the underground garage.

  And, damn, the confident look on her face pissed him off. Watching him nibble around the hook. Finally he put the note in his pocket and grumbled, “You better come with me.”

  She nodded, loaded her bags, and hopped into the Jeep.

  Broker pulled into a FINA station, filled the Cherokee with super unleaded and continued through town without speaking. Tuna alone he could discount. But Tuna and Trin…He stopped at a tobacco shop and bought a carton of cigarettes, American Spirits.

  “Starting smoking again, huh? You nervous?” said Nina.

  “They don’t have chemical additives. They’re good for you.”

  “I get it. Health food cigarettes-”

  “Shut up,” said Broker.

  At his place, he ignored several neighbors who came out to stare at him. Stepping around smashed furniture, Nina heated water and made instant coffee. They took the coffee into his backyard and gazed down the river valley.

  “Aren’t you going to clean up?” she asked.

  “Up north.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “We’ll stop on the road. Right now I just want to get out of town.”

  “Oh. Look.”

  Five carnival-striped hot air balloons, which had launched out of Lakeland, south of town, sailed low up the river. Absurd embellishments presented on the day, Broker thought that they should trail Monty Python’s Flying Circus captions. Like the number five written in the sky…

  There had been five of them. Ray was dead. Tuna was dying. That left three…What would it be like, seeing LaPorte after all these years?

  He had glimpsed him occasionally on television. Usually on MacNeil-Lehrer, brought on as a military expert during Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Gulf War. He had a reputation as a frosty critic of the overreliance on technology in the touchy-feely volunteer army.

  Slowly Broker withdrew the folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket and smoothed it on his thigh.

  Find Trin.

  He looked up. Nina watched him carefully fold the note and tuck it in his chest pocket. “Well, I’m going to take a shower, after I pour some Spic ‘n’ Span in the tub,” she said.

  Alone in the backyard, he lit a Spirit and sipped his coffee and watched the airships trail over him like gaudy pageantry. Their shadows billowed over his shrubbery and one shadow swallowed him briefly before it passed on.

  Broker had accustomed himself to pulling the blinds of his life to ply his trade in darkness. Now, with Nina’s sudden intrusion in his life, he was confronted with the naggingly obvious thought he always avoided: The darkness might just be a shadow cast by an object, in this case, an unresolved event.

  Even calloused by almost two decades of police work, he had never made peace with Ray Pryce’s desertion. He had come to view this as an emotional difficulty that flew in the face of evidence. It was probably the motive behind his continued association with the dead man’s crazy daughter. Now maybe he had a chance to lay it to rest. Remove the object. The thought was too big. Magical in its simplicity.

  But Nina’s assertion that LaPorte was somehow to blame was sheer fantasy. Broker had seen LaPorte literally sacrifice his career at the inquest in an attempt to salvage Pryce’s reputation.

  Even Jimmy Tuna, who had joked about growing up in a New York Mafia family, and whom LaPorte had expertly kept on a leash, never struck Broker as being capable of deserting a buddy in wartime.

  Trin…

  On the night of April 29, 1975, Broker had gone into Hue City to rescue the always mysterious Colonel Trin…or so he thought at the time.

  Gold. There was that syllable again. What if LaPorte was on a treasure hunt.

  Maybe I could cut myself in. He had Nina’s paranoia as an entry. Somebody had to return LaPorte’s maps…

  He shook his head, annoyed at the way his imagination broke into a canter. And he was suddenly angry that these men, living, dying, and dead, whom he had known on two brief occasions, were still the planets exerting an influence on his life.

  He took out the note again, got up, went into the destroyed kitchen, and stared at the telephone. He cocked an ear and determined that the shower was running upstairs. His hand shook as he picked up the phone and punched information and worked through the voice tapes until he had an overseas operator.

  “What country?”

  “Vietnam, Hue City,” said Broker in a dry voice.

  “You can dial direct.”

  The parts of Broker that lived in the present collided with the parts he kept ice cold on meathooks. He lit another Spirit off the half-burned stub of the one he had going. A film of sweat formed on his palms as he found the international code in the phone book. Just written right there. Vietnam: 11. What do you know. He punched in the number.

  Seconds later a Vietnamese voice said hello on the other side of the world. Some hotel, “Hue,” he recognized.

  He slammed the phone into the cradle as though it was hot.

  Crazy.

  But he copied the number onto several cards in his wallet for safe-keeping. Broker stored his passport in the freezer of his refrigerator as a precaution against losing it. He opened the icebox and retrieved the frozen document and weighed it in his palm. Then he slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. Now what? He seesawed back and forth. Planets in a tug of war.

  It was too much. Twenty years of habit squirmed at this budding heresy and he retreated into the comfort of denial.

  She was nuts. Probably still bent out of shape from the army thing.

  On the second day of Desert Storm, Capt. Nina Pryce, in charge of a military police company trailing the advance of the 24th Mech. across the Iraqi desert, strayed in a sandstorm, got separated from her troops, and had driven her humvee into a nasty situation that had developed between a lost company of the 24th and a bypassed Republican Guard battalion.

  It was an unusual, low-tech close-quarters fight for that “clean” desert cakewalk. A meeting engagement in the blinding sand. Nina arrived to find the company commander and his lieutenants down. A lucky shot had taken out the command vehicle. Communications were snarled. The Iraqis were encircling.

  As ranking officer, and by force of example, she took command and proved to be utterly ruthless in action. Instinctively, she led the company in a charge through the encirclement, and reversed the tactical situation and attacked the Iraqis in the rear. The Iraqis, surprised when their pincers closed on empty desert, disintegrated. It took less than an hour. When communications were restored, Nina’s M-16 was smoking hot, she had wounds in her left hip and over one hundred Republican Guards were dead and three hundred were prisoners. She lost five men, and took twenty-t
hree wounded, six of whom she had personally dragged out of the line of fire.

  Word got out and CNN found her in an unpleasant mood at an aid station after she’d been chewed out for exceeding her authority by a colonel who didn’t have the full picture. Nina, always more salty than demure when her ire was stirred up, made a crack, not realizing that the video was rolling. A reporter asked what had happened out there. Nina replied, “Not much, except that if I had a dick I’d probably be a major.”

  The remark wouldn’t die and was rebroadcast endlessly in the media. Sometimes bleeped, sometimes not. It hounded her, but she kept her professional cool, refused to comment, just doing her job. The real firestorm torched off months later. A ranking congresswoman joined forces with some retired generals and used Nina as a stalking horse to pose an inevitable question.

  Nina had brilliantly commanded infantry in close-quarters ground combat, even after sustaining wounds. She had personally killed some of the bad guys and had saved some of the good guys and she had won.

  They recommended that she be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge for her actions in the Gulf. Fed by rhetorical gasoline from army hard-liners on the one side and Tailhook-impassioned feminists on the other, the dispute rocketed onto national television. More than one TV commentator remarked about Nina’s “star quality.”

  The U.S. Army wasn’t impressed. It closed ranks. Someone in the Pentagon took the low road and fed the media a murky snippet about how her father died in the process of deserting his comrades under fire.

  The high-road resistance simply stated that a woman had never been awarded the CIB. Technically, Nina wasn’t eligible. The award was reserved for infantry and women weren’t allowed in the infantry. She could have her Silver Star and her Purple Heart but the CIB was high sacrilege. It would crack open the combat arms to the libbers. Two hundred years of tradition fell on Nina Pryce.

  Approached by the press, she coolly pointed out that there was a lot of medal inflation in the Gulf ground war, which had lasted all of four days against human sea attacks of surrendering Iraqis. Her dad, she said, had spent six months under fire against a real army to earn his CIB in Europe. Her response prompted questions about her father and rumors of secret hearings. Her father, she charged, had been falsely convicted in absentia. After laying down that challenge to the army she quietly resigned her commission.

  Broker wanted to believe that the combined effect of her resignation and her mother’s passing had snapped her. He shook his head. He didn’t really know her.

  He did know that when she arrived she set up dominion. She was somebody. And she had something that was taking on an irresistible momentum.

  Find Broker. Have Broker find Trin. All arranged. Written in a dead man’s hand.

  12

  Broker called his folks and told them he was coming up, and that he had Nina Pryce with him. Then he loaded a quick travel bag and slapped his cell phone into the Jeep glove compartment. As they pulled out of the drive he glowered at Nina as she warily swiveled her head, scouting the street. “You have your gun, right?” she said.

  “Don’t start. Not yet,” said Broker.

  He drove downtown to the business district, pulled in back of a row of brick storefronts and took his Thermos into a coffee shop and had it filled with strong French roast. Nina stayed at his side. Getting back into the car, she lightened up a tad. She laughed when she saw a riverboat churn through the old railroad lift bridge that crossed the St. Croix, and the tourists wandering the waterfront pavilions of an art fair and the church steeples that dotted the bluff. “Jeez, Broker, you wound up in a Grandma Moses painting. This isn’t you. Uh-uh.”

  He wanted to strangle her. He wanted his quiet underground life back.

  She poured coffee in the Thermos cup and held it for him so he could drive one-and-a-half-handed. He hot-footed it up Highway 95 through the river valley and turned east twenty minutes later, crossing the St. Croix River at Osceola, Wisconsin. Now he took less traveled State 35 up the Wisconsin side. He liked driving this particular road, finding comfort in the way the fields, forest, farms, and small towns stayed frozen in time.

  He rolled down the window and felt summer heat crowd in the new foliage along the tree lines and smelled it trickle in damp waves across the new-plowed fields. He’d always had too much imagination and that complicated a cop’s instinctive aversion to hot summer nights and full moons. He glanced over at Nina, who had finally yielded to fatigue and yesterday’s whiskey and had fallen asleep in the warm sunlight. No, it started before he was a cop. It was his experience that murderous folly flocked in the tropical heat.

  The red Georgia dirt was ninety-eight degrees in the shade on the day that Broker went to visit Nina Pryce, in July 1975, on officer’s row at Fort Benning. Vietnam was finally done and the flags sagged on the lanyards across the base in the heavy doldrums of defeat.

  They were bleak, the houses where the army boards its majors, especially when all the furniture has been removed and the family of a man who will not return from war stands in the empty rooms for the last time.

  And the empty rooms were worse when the army moved you out with the cold, efficient energy of censure.

  She was nine years old, carrot-topped, with big knees and big gray eyes and braces on her teeth. Her mother’s face conveyed a look of absent practicality that wondered: How can I afford the braces now? Her brother sat outside in the car, his head buried in a comic book. Nina stood fiercely at her mother’s side.

  Marian Pryce was alone. No neighbors had come with casseroles and no children played in the street. The moving van sat in the driveway like the bogeyman.

  The officer who faced Marian and her daughter was not a chaplain, but was instead a sassy second lieutenant from the base coordinator’s office turned out in glossy leather, starched fatigues, and a laminated helmet liner. Instead of solace, he held a clipboard in his hand. He toured the quarters entering checkmarks on his clipboard, making sure Marian and her two children had not “stolen” anything from the federal government.

  The investigation was over and now Ray Pryce’s family was being escorted off the base and out of the army.

  The little girl had stood up to the starched martinet and stated in a steady, precocious voice: “If my dad is dead in the war he should have a flag even if you can’t find his body.”

  The second lieutenant was a real prick who did not do her the courtesy of meeting her eyes. His pencil scratched on the clipboard and his voice was another cruel dismissal in official language: “Your father is not authorized a flag because his service wasn’t honorable.”

  Perhaps Nina’s personality was formed at that moment. She kicked the lieutenant in the shin, carefully hitting him above his boot leather so it’d hurt.

  And 1st Lt. Phillip Broker, twenty-three years old, a lean, scorched splinter thrown off from the recent catastrophe in Southeast Asia, who was almost senseless from a week of testifying and being questioned by army lawyers, and whose angry confused attempts to defend Nina’s absent father only stacked the evidence against him, Phillip Broker said good-bye to the army.

  The method he chose was to take the lieutenant and throw him bodily through the front door and send him sprawling on the sidewalk. Then he stomped his Corcoran jump boot down on the clipboard and smashed it to smithereens. The lieutenant opted for a retrograde maneuver, ass backward through the nearest shrubbery.

  Marian Pryce, sensing that Broker was necessary to her daughter at this moment, signaled with her dry eyes and took a last cardboard box from the kitchen counter and carried it out the door. The moving van pulled away. Marian waited in her car.

  Nina stood her ground, defiantly alone in the empty house. Broker, knowing nothing of children, knelt and said to her, “I want you to walk out of here like you own the place.”

  To underscore the point, Broker had escorted her down the rows of houses to a playground. They sat in the swings and their heels made swirls in the hot, chalky-red dust. Nina said n
othing. Her large eyes roved the base, vacuuming in detail.

  And then Broker had said the words that he’d come to regret: “If you ever need anything, you know, help, come find me.”

  She’d nodded solemnly. Down the block, her mother blew the horn. Nina’s eyes were fixed in a stare across an empty parade field, on a limp American flag hanging in the dripping heat.

  13

  Like the doctor said, Broker’s hand did not throb so badly when he put it on top of his head. It was awkward driving this way and for the moment, with Nina asleep, he didn’t feel so foolish, but the posture suggested the gesture of a slow-witted man pondering an enormous dilemma.

  Which wasn’t that far off, the dilemma part. Easiest thing would be to reject her story wholesale. Just not think about it.

  Drawing strength from the premise of leaving the past undisturbed, he sketched out what he would do: first off, not get mad at her. How was she to know he’d be working. Talk to her, humor her and then, at the right time, gently hand her off to a professional. He knew people. It would have to be a woman, but it was a stretch finding a woman therapist qualified to appreciate the lonely piece of ground that Nina had staked out for herself.

  Problem being, what she needed for a shrink was a bare-ass Celtic warrior-priestess with her nipples dunked in blue woad.

  She was like him. Therapy was for other people, people who worked in offices. Got a personal problem? Tell it to the chaplain. In other words: tough shit. His eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He had seen the Saturn yesterday. Damn if he hadn’t caught some of her contagious paranoia.

  He was well beyond the city traffic now and the limboland where tract houses chewed into tree lines. He smelled fresh manure and the contours of freshly plowed fields eased his eyes. A tiny green John Deere tractor dragged a mustard sail across the horizon.